iOi Hackathon Framework Sponsor: Lyrebird

We are almost a month away from our iOi Summit in San Francisco and the in-person part of the Hackathon. The sponsor I wanted to highlight today is called Lyrebird and they offer a truly innovative service. Lyrebird’s AI is built for synthesizing real people’s voices and producing some uncanny replication of voice.

I’ve demonstrated this to people in the lab and they are very surprised about how much it can actually sound like my voice. I tried out their system by reading in 70+ sentences supplied by Lyrebird, so they can map my voice to the text and understand how I pronounce vowels, consonants and my cadence.

Now, Lyrebird’s system maps my voice and produces a voice that can then be used for my purposes. For each of the recordings below, I typed in text and the software read it in my digital voice. You will hear some buzzing in this and that is because when I recorded this, I was in a room with fans running. But, I have to say, this is pretty cool to hear my voice in its synthesized form:

Where I see this working in real estate is for the final recording talking about property amenities. Imagine data from your listings is fed into your synthesized voice and it could read them out for a client.That could be used to communicate with clients when you are not available. Pretty cool.

I want to highlight a pretty special use case of this technology outside of real estate. Lyrebird has partnered with the ALS association to create Project Revoice. Remember the Ice Bucket Challenge? Well it turns out that the founder of the challenge, Pat Quinn, has lost his voice because of ALS. Lyrebird has helped create a synthesized voice for his computer that is more his own. Check it out below:

Thank you to Lyrebird for sponsoring our Hackathon and providing their Framework API!!